Novel a pageant of responses to death

For AP Weekly Features

Boyd Schaeffer is starting a new job. Exploring a cave. Inviting the undertaker to dinner.

"Life After Death" is a startling treatment of grief that challenges the reader who expects demonstrative sorrow from its newly widowed protagonist. Instead, it offers a veritable pageant of human response to death, both as an idea and as a practical matter.

This novel about a woman whose husband dies in the prime of his life is also about the lives of all who are touched by the death.

Her 4-year-old daughter passes from hibernation to distracted imagination; the dead man's mother hoards her knowledge of his last moments; the undertaker tries to woo the widow through some vague connection to his long-dead sister; and the embalmer lectures about the dignity of the dead as he vacuums blood from their corpses.

And the widow? A hostile conversation shortly before her husband, Russell, dies is but a thumbnail sketch of their troubled relationship, which doesn't end after his heart stops beating:

"Why did I stay with him? Because of something so obvious as the stupid hope that passion -- that eternal awkward potential -- represents? A rush of disgust. She touches her mouth again. Death's implacable presentation of the body has brought back the limitations of her own capacity for ... hope? Potential: a kind of terrible smooth erotic mechanism, then shame. ... That she could grasp her own suffering only through the intellect, only through a steady refusal of the flesh, of its possibilities of healing, has been clear to her from some time."

Muske-Dukes uses letters, poems, memories, hallucination and dreams to jolt the reader out of simply receiving the wisdom of one character's point of view. At the same time, she attempts to pull together her carefully wrought perspectives with mixed results.

Occasionally, these attempts defy belief. At the funeral, Boyd not only telepathically experiences a memory of her husband through his mother, but also is conscious of it. "She believes, irrationally, that Gerda's memories of Russell, secret images never shared with another, have somehow bled into her brain." The book does not establish itself as a fantasy, and this moment seems an awkward attempt at narrative flow.

Largely, though, Muske-Dukes draws haunting connections among people and events, creating little moments of insight while depicting the random nature of life. Her description of Boyd's daughter learning to read is tangible, and also illustrative of the girl's grief process as she finally comprehends her father's death.